Most commercial (e.g., office) buildings employ a full-time building engineer whose responsibilities include maintaining and adjusting the building's heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system in response to occupants' feedback. More particularly, these commercial buildings may have one or more HVAC zones within the building (e.g., office suites, individual floors, wings of the building, etc.) individually serviced by the HVAC system, and the building engineer may be responsible for adjusting the HVAC system to suit the occupants of the corresponding zone. For example, if the building engineer receives complaints from the occupants of a third floor of the building (as one example of an HVAC zone) indicating that they are too hot, the building engineer may turn on or adjust the air conditioning in order to lower the temperature of air supplied to the third floor. In contrast, if the building engineer receives complaints from the occupants of the third floor indicating that they are too cold, the building engineer may turn on or adjust the heating in order to raise the temperature of the air supplied to the third floor.
In this regard, much of the building engineer's day may be spent visiting various HVAC zones and addressing complaints regarding the air temperature therein. Further, the building engineer often may be required to arbitrate disputes between occupants of a given zone. That is, the occupants of a given zone may have differing opinions regarding their preferred air temperature for the zone. Accordingly, if the building engineer adjusts the HVAC to raise the air temperature of a given zone in response to a complaint from a first occupant indicating that the zone is too cold, the engineer may inadvertently displease a second occupant who finds the adjusted temperature too warm.
This traditional approach (i.e., adjusting the HVAC system in response to complaints of the occupants) results in an air temperature which may not be optimal because the building engineer is reacting to the complaints of a few occupants within the zone rather than determining a collective preference of all the occupants. Further, this approach may be inefficient because the building engineer is required to constantly adjust the air temperature up and down throughout a day in response to the varying preferences of the occupants.
Accordingly, there remains a need to provide a building engineer and/or an HVAC system with feedback in order to adjust the HVAC system to an optimal set-point temperature accordingly.